The Baker’s Wife
BY DEVON HALLIDAY
She did something else before this—she might even have done it well. Refugee resettlement advocate, dental hygienist, accountant, small claims court lawyer, social media manager, physical therapist, insurance agent, pharmacist, dance teacher. Whatever it was and however long she’d spent doing it, six years, ten years, she makes no mention of it now. It was a gradual giving-up, a letting-slide. She can remember the beginning of the end, some summer Thursday when she drove to the bakery and found her husband defeated, a fortress of dishes walling him in at the back sink, the front counter pebbly with crumbs and forgotten snags of crust. “Sit down,” she told him. She swept the front; he showed her how to do the dishes and she washed them. She felt as she did so a heady onrush of love. He who so often seemed remote, locked in battles she could not understand (the baguettes weren’t turning out this week—why? she had no ideas nor suggestions). This she could do. Sit him down; tell him it would be all right; fight his smallest battles for him.
When his only full-time employee left, she did her best to fill in, here and there, around her schedule, and then it was her job that seemed to fit awkwardly around the bakery schedule, the daily rhythm they both breathed, eight p.m. to bed, three a.m. to rise. One bad day at the office and that was it. When she quit, he told her not to do it on his account—“I can manage,” he said. “If you change your mind or find another job, I’ll be okay.” “I know,” she said, but she didn’t want this to be the case, actually. She wanted him to say, I need you here, please quit your job and come help me survive mine. He didn’t say this, and she did it anyway.
Now she can be found at the counter five days a week, nine or ten hours a day, hair pulled back, smile wide above a stained and floured shirt. “Will that be all for you?” she says. There’s nothing she can’t consummately recommend. “Oh, that one,” she says. “Fantastic with soup, great for sandwiches or just sliced thick with butter. That’s probably the one I bring home the most often.” She says this about all the breads, except maybe the rye. “Is there anything you don’t like?” the customers tease her. When they ask a question she doesn’t know the answer to, she says, “Let me go ask the baker.” She doesn’t care whether they know that she’s the baker’s wife, in fact she likes when they find it out late, months or years into a casual customer service acquaintanceship: “We’re closing up for the holidays, heading to Michigan,” she says, and they say, “The whole staff?” “Every time I see you, you’re in a good mood,” they tell her, scolding a little, amazed. They seem to forget that it’s her job to be indefatigably cheerful, that her sunshine smile and her “Any plans for the weekend?” are financial maneuvers. Or maybe they know this, but are just grateful for someone to talk to. Some of them will stand at the counter fifteen minutes with their bread in hand, telling her about their daughter-in-law’s dog problems and the roof leakage issue from last winter. “Well—see ya!” they finally say when another customer walks in. And she, already turning her high-wattage smile on her next target, calls back, “Have a good one!”
The baker’s wife is good at her job. Maybe not the best—she imagines sometimes some more efficient employee her husband might hire who would streamline the front-of-house and make her hard-won skills obsolete—but she’s very good. Their old part-time counter workers have been let go. She didn’t like them, didn’t trust them, and anyway she works better alone, just like her husband, buried in the back of the shop, timers bleating and mixers whirring and clunking and water pounding down out of the faucet. Sometimes a loud metallic banging comes from the back in erratic bursts. “Flattening the butter for the croissants,” she says to the customer’s quizzical glance, and when the customer leaves she slips through the swinging door into the back of the shop. “Fuck this,” says the baker. “Fuck this!” “I know,” she says. He’s hitting things again, beating his fist against the metal bench. In the trash, a sticky wad of dough. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Why do I fucking do this?” he says. She touches his shoulder, and a bell chimes from the front. “Sorry,” she says, and she walks out to greet the customer with an easy smile, and she keeps them chatting as the pounding from the back dwindles into silence. At the end of the day she comes back, puts her arms around him where he stands at the dish sink. “I’m sorry about earlier,” he says. She says, “I can take it.”
Sometimes she says the wrong thing. She is always trying to solve problems she doesn’t understand. “If you want to close tomorrow, we can close,” she says. “I’ll put a sign on the door, I’ll cancel the orders.” Through his hand, which is hooked around his face, he says, “Half the dough’s already proofing. If I don’t bake it tomorrow I’ll just have to throw it out.” He closes his eyes, he breathes in for a few long seconds. “All right. We won’t have enough tomorrow morning, but I’ll see what I can do. Don’t take any more orders.” “Let me know how I can help,” she says, knowing that her voice sounds grasping and small against the floury grime of the white tile walls and the fluorescent drone of the overheads and the oven’s rattling groan as it kicks back on, gas, flame. “You’re already helping,” he says, but she’s not, really. Everything falls to his shoulders in the end.
In their small town, he is the only baker, the only real baker, his competitors grocery stores and cafés that get their sandwich loaves shipped frozen from the city. He does not advertise; he won’t let her post on their years-neglected social media accounts. “If you could lose us a few customers, that would be great,” he says, not really joking, and she laughs. “I can’t help it that I’m so charming,” she says. The real problem, as they both know, is that the baker is too good. He cares too much, works too hard, succeeds too often. The one test batch of cinnamon raisin bread he put out on a whim some slow afternoon—people are still asking about it years later. When is that coming back? The baker’s wife invents all sorts of reasons it’s off the shelves. Can’t source a certain type of flour, time-consuming to bake, hard to fit in among all their other offerings, the whole grain sourdough and oh the apple buckwheat bread, have they tried that yet? That’s probably the closest substitute. The truth is the baker didn’t like it, the cinnamon raisin. Good enough for him is better than anyone’s asking for. They will line up for his weakest efforts, his worst days. “It’s okay,” the baker’s wife says about the rye sourdough, flat and scabrous as it comes out of the oven, “people will still buy it.” “That makes me feel even worse,” says the baker.
The shop is crowded all morning and afternoon, until she’s selling the last three loaves, half burnt from the back shelves. “I’m not sure I can physically make more than this,” the baker says, coming out to check the damage. She hangs up the Closed sign, returns to behind the counter, where she keeps sweeping the shelves as he keeps talking. “Sometimes I wish,” the baker says, “that we lived in a remote seaside village with eleven customers, and every morning I could make eleven loaves of bread and everyone would get what they wanted.” He doesn’t sound despairing as he says this, though he has said similar things before despairingly. A customer tries the locked door, reads the sign, tries it again, walks away. The baker’s wife says, “I’ll go home and get dinner started?”
She is always the first to say that they could cut production, limit their hours, extend their weekend, drop the pastries and focus on bread, drop the baguettes and the ciabatta and the Sicilian loaves and the seeded wheat and focus on sourdough, they could close for three months, they could close indefinitely. “If you want to sell the place, we can do that,” she says. “Get away from it all and take up, I don’t know, candlestick-making. Or just travel.” She says this earnestly, and what follows is a moment of fear that the baker will agree. The baker’s wife, though she is often stressed and exhausted (though not as stressed and exhausted as her husband, she would hasten to add), does not want to give up the bakery. The bakery is the most successful thing she’s ever taken part in. No one has ever wanted her classes, her research, her rough drafts, her art, her opinion as much as they want her husband’s bread. They line up for it, wait in the rain for it, knock on the locked door for it. “I don’t know,” says the baker. “I don’t see a way out. Anyone wanting to buy this place would have to be a trained baker, and when’s the last time a trained baker came through town?” “You,” she says, and he says, “Me.” “We’d figure it out,” says the baker’s wife. “If you ever wanted to sell, we would figure it out.” And then at eight p.m. as he falls asleep she tries to brace herself in advance for the day that it is all too much, the day he sells the place. What will she do? Go back to the pharmacy, the dance studio, the accounting firm, the nonprofit, the blank page? She can’t think of anything else she’s suited for, anymore.
On the weekends, they agree that they will talk about the sales figures, the fall menu, the rising demand and how to adjust the production schedule accordingly, the oven’s steam valves which leak water every other night across the floor, taking half their clean rags to fully absorb. They will find a way to make the baker’s life sustainable, and hers too, because he knows she’s working incredibly hard at the counter day after day (“Not as hard as you,” she says). But on the weekends, they wake up late, slouch blearily around the house, eat half-meals of bread and cheese and olive oil, read more of whatever article or bread book they set aside last weekend. Sometimes the baker will show his wife a recipe he’d like to try, which sounds to the baker’s wife just as good as everything he already makes. “Should we talk about the shop?” she sometimes says, cautiously, and most weekends the baker says, “Let’s talk about it later. I need some time to just—” “Of course,” she says, and the weekend passes before anything gets discussed. The weekends pass quickly because they last only one day; the shop is closed Sunday and Monday, but Monday must be spent preparing for Tuesday, and somehow these preparations always take eight hours at least, and they leave at five or six p.m. saying to each other, “It’s okay, don’t worry about it, just leave it, I’ll come in early tomorrow and get it done,” saying, “I don’t want you to have to do that in the morning, let me, it shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes,” saying, “We can’t burn ourselves out at the start of the week, let’s just leave it, if we don’t have scones tomorrow it’s not the end of the world.”
(And then how it hurts when the first customer of the day, Tuesday eight a.m. sharp, asks for scones, is bewildered by their absence in a way that, to the baker’s wife, feels irretrievably personal, the customer walking out dejected and purchaseless, it shouldn’t matter but to the baker’s wife it does, their parting words echoing under the empty chime of the bell, “No, it was a scone I wanted, but thanks anyway…”)
But some weekends they actually do discuss the bakery. These are the weekends they make a plan, café breakfast at this hour, or restaurant dinner at this hour, the plan being that they will use the meal to settle the more pressing questions of their business, e.g. is it killing us, is it worth it. “If I just reduce the number of breads I make, but keep the quantity high,” the baker says, and his wife says, “All right, so let’s go through the list and see which ones we can cut.” “I could cut the rye,” the baker says, and the baker’s wife winces, anticipating the thousand conversations with disappointed and sometimes angry customers about the disappeared rye. “But I like having at least one rye option on the shelf,” the baker says, and the baker’s wife says, “Maybe we keep that one and cut something else?”
Nothing ever gets decided during these meetings, not permanently. The baker’s wife, though she knows her husband’s health and sanity take priority, still can’t help but advocate for the customer, resisting the shrinking of the menu, the limiting of the hours—she contradicts herself wretchedly, saying “I think we should do whatever it takes to make your life easier, if we lose a few customers who cares, the important thing is to make this livable for you, for us,” but then also saying “I’m just worried that if we stop doing croissants…” The baker sometimes points this out, saying something like “Whose side are you on?”, and then she’s profusely apologetic and privately ashamed, and resolves to listen more and suggest less, because all her suggestions and bright ideas end up as new weights on her husband’s shoulders, the daily specials, the seasonal pastries, the weekly newsletter, the system for phone orders—and so she takes back as much of the weight as she can, writing the newsletters, promoting the specials, but it’s too late, anyway. Whatever is good for the customer is hell on the baker, is what she’s learning. “I couldn’t do this without you,” says the baker, and the baker’s wife fears that she’s engineered her own indispensability by making everything harder to begin with. But, also, what a relief, what a novelty, to be needed.
The customers know that she is their advocate, and they wear her down accordingly, hinting and complaining and critiquing with saintly persistence (“No cinnamon twists?” says one of the regulars every morning as he comes in, with a coy look, for months, every morning) until finally with an outsize hopeless smile the baker’s wife says, “I’ll mention it to the baker, see what we can do.” These customers are mostly mischievous charming old men who say the most merciless things with the gestures of a shared joke, and by the time they leave the shop the baker’s wife is sometimes close to tears. “Someone didn’t keep an eye on the oven today,” they say, about the sourdough’s dark flared crust, as meanwhile the baker on the eleventh hour of his shift folds tomorrow’s dough in huge floured bins. “The bread is supposed to look like that,” the baker’s wife could say, “the dark coloring is a sign that the natural sugars in the bread have caramelized, deepening the flavor,” but she rarely says this because she has learned that no one actually wants her explanation. “Seems like it’s time to start making more bread,” they say meaningfully about the empty shelves, and they don’t want to know why that isn’t possible, or how full the shelves were this morning before the customers stormed through, triple the usual production, no avail.
She almost never passes their comments on to the baker, which means she carries them around inside her all day, defending his honor in the shower, coming up with a dozen pithy responses to the oven comment, none of which would convince or chagrin the customer in question, who said it just to say it, she knows this. She is the recipient of everyone’s pent-up frustrations and some days she accepts this and even feels sort of noble about it: she is providing a service to the lonely, to the sour. Other days she feels like the town’s designated punching bag. No matter what they say to her she has to stand there smiling through it, and they know this, and take advantage. “How was your day?” her husband asks her, and the truth is that a certain dig about the olive loaf is haunting her, but she can’t pass it on to him, make his day worse than it already was. “Customers were getting under my skin today,” she says, “you know how it is.” “I know,” he says, because he used to work the counter shift too. “You’re a hero for what you do up there,” he says, and then she has to turn it around and point out how staggeringly heroic his own efforts are, the sheer amount he’s producing singlehanded, the best bread anyone in this town has ever had, customers coming in sometimes saying “I’m just back from Paris and honestly, your baguettes are better,” which the baker tells her is ridiculous and patently untrue, but whatever, it’s nice of them to say.
Most of the customers in fact are nice. They ask her name and remember it, they tell her what the weather’s like out there and express the hope that she will be able to go out and enjoy it before long. They are rapturous about the weekly newsletter, whose original purpose was just to defray complaints (“Heads-up that this is the last week of potato bread for the season! The time to stock your freezer is NOW”) but which seems to have come into its own as a packaged weekly missive of manic good cheer. “I look forward to your newsletter every week,” the customers tell her, and the one day she forgets to send it, they come in asking about it, “I kept refreshing my email, eight p.m., nine p.m…” This stuns her, actually, and as with everything it becomes another burden: now she must live up to their expectations. She spends at least an hour on it every time, proofreading obsessively. “I love your newsletter. You’re actually,” the customers say, eyes bright with sudden generous insight, “a really good writer,” and on the other side of the counter, the baker’s wife blinks in a quick deluge of clarity: that’s it. That’s what she used to do.
“Thank you,” she always says. “I try to keep it entertaining.” She is genuinely moved, sometimes, the baker’s wife, by the customers’ affection for her—but when she tries to communicate this, she finds herself saying the same heartfelt stock phrases as always. “Must be nice to be so loved,” the second-in-line customer says, twinkling, as the first-in-line customer leaves still gushing praise. “We’re very grateful to have such a supportive community,” the baker’s wife says blankly, meaninglessly, trying to smile with all the warmth she’s got left. The phone is ringing. “How can I help you?” she says, receiver pressed up to her ear, as she taps the customer’s credit card against the reader and mouths apologetic thank-yous across the counter. “I was hoping to have something set aside for tomorrow,” says the customer on the phone. “Absolutely, what did you have in mind,” says the baker’s wife, and she listens with her whole body and soul and takes down their order in a neat shorthand, five loaves (“the lighter ones!” specifies the customer, “I hate to be a pain but I just don’t like burned bread for some reason”) and two boxes of pastries. She hangs up, copies the number from caller ID, breathes. The starters were slow this morning (the weather’s cooling, the golden days of summer already over, she can’t remember a single one she actually witnessed, besides through the glass door and its breezy inward swing) and so her husband is still here, waiting on the levain. “Everything okay?” he says, and when she shakes her head he holds her in his heavy arms, and when the bell chimes over the door he says, “Let me,” and he sends her through to the back as he sells the customer the day’s last baguette and two croissants, as she sits shaking on the flour bags.
“It’ll be okay,” he says, when the customer’s gone and the shop is quiet.
“They’re just so,” she says.
“I know.”
The bell chimes; the timer on the levain goes off. “I’m okay,” the baker’s wife says, waving him off. “You do your thing.” She reemerges through the swinging door and smiles at the customers and sweeps and restocks the white paper bags and the cardboard pastry boxes and flips the sign to closed. They are so kind to her, mostly, the customers. She hands them whatever they ask for and they walk out holding the bread her husband worked all night making and she thinks, What we do here is real. She can remember, dimly, as if from some best-forgotten dream, what it felt like, hours at her laptop, emails and submissions and edits and applications, the small brave ticking of her ambition, and in the end it was still just intangible, reducible, fragile, nothing more than the tendrils of her ego floating outward trying to latch onto what, she can’t even remember. She has never mattered to more people than she does right now. She has never mattered more to her husband, who says to her again and again “I couldn’t do it without you,” who nudges into her warmth at night like she’s the only safe place. The baker’s wife kisses her husband and sets her alarm for 3:15am so that, in case the baker sleeps through his alarm, she can wake him up in time—she has learned to do this ever since his phone died overnight once, and he woke cursing at 4:30am and dressed in such a storm that she couldn’t sleep the rest of the night, lay staring up in dread at the thought of what he must be going through, with the dough overproofing and the oven still too low in temperature and the customers all morning irate that their bread was too warm to slice… The baker doesn’t know about the alarm, doesn’t know that at 3:15 every morning she rolls over and checks his side of the bed, palm on the cold sheets, before falling back into the night’s first restful sleep: the baker has made it to the shop, he has it all under control.
And then, one night, at the midpoint of a week like any other, her alarm goes off and she turns and the baker is there, pale in the bedroom’s darkness, sitting up, not moving. “Everything okay?” she says.
“I can’t do it,” he says.
The house is quiet, the heat clunking, the first week they’ve had to turn it on. “Can’t—?”
“I can’t go back there.”
She has, in their twelve years of marriage, never once seen him cry. She can’t believe at first that he is crying. “That’s okay,” she says, quickly, not understanding.
“I’m too—I’m broken. I can’t do it.”
“That’s okay. That’s okay. We can close. We can close for the whole week if you want to.”
“There’s a flour delivery today, I have to be there to move the… And all the dough I mixed yesterday, it’s just going to… I don’t want to have to…”
“It’s okay. Let me handle it. You go back to sleep.”
“If we close, it’s just going to make everything harder, all the dough I’ll have to throw out, and we just ordered flour, and if we cancel orders today we’ll have twice as many tomorrow… I can’t go in there,” he says, contradicting himself, crying again, and the expression contorting his face is one she’ll never live down.
“I know. It’s okay. Here’s what’s going to happen.” The baker’s wife is upright, holding his hand in both of hers, she has never been more awake, her whole soul is roused in terror but she speaks very calmly and she faces him, she makes him look chin up into her eyes. “I’m going to go to the shop at seven and put up a sign that we’re closed, and I’ll post online and I’ll change the voicemail and I’ll say we’re closed through the end of the week and to stay tuned for more details. Okay? And I’ll stay there for the flour delivery, and I’ll get rid of the dough before it overproofs, and I’ll clean out the fridges of anything that’s going to go bad. Okay? And you’re going to stay here and sleep. You just need to sleep.”
“Okay,” he says, his voice frightening her, empty and shaken.
“I will handle it. We’ll get you some sleep and then later in the week we can figure out what to do. But not now. Go back to sleep and I’ll see you when you wake up.”
“Okay,” he says, and as he slumps back into his pillow she takes his phone and checks that all the alarms are turned off, 2:15 2:35 2:45 2:50 3:00 3:05, and then she turns off the phone too for good measure, and places it on her bedside table and not his, and then for the next four hours as the sun begins its slow crawl out of the darkness below the earth she lies absolutely awake, reeling in tight organized cycles, envisioning the coming hours, what the sign will say, the voicemail, the newsletter she’ll send, “Unexpected closure”, the promises she can’t make about when and whether they’ll reopen, the sixteen fifty-pound bags of flour she’ll have to move into storage, the number of customers that will pull crossly on the locked door as she calls to cancel and refund the day’s prepaid orders, and actually all of this is a comfort to think about, she keeps thinking about the long list of tasks to check off, her tasks, hers, thinking about them consciously with panic and relief, because once all this is done the bakery will be closed, really closed and over and done, and then what is she to anyone? But for today she is still the baker’s wife, and he needs her. She does not fall asleep. She carries the bags of flour one by one, fifty pounds, fifty pounds, from the pallet outside through the bakery’s back door, tracing the path again and again in her mind, anticipating the sweat that’s going to form along her hairline and the soreness that’s going to build up in her arms. She is not very strong, the baker’s wife. She is good only for this.
